I suppose I should tell you how my life
started. Contextually my life before he showed up. Yet I feel like I
will start with an ending. My normal life ended at a funeral. My
father's. Or the man I had believed to be my father my whole life. I
sat in a crematorium chapel listening to some minister I didn't know,
say nice things about a man, he clearly didn't know and stared out of
the window to the garden along side. I watched the blackbird hopping
around the small lawn. I stood for the awful hymn that my father
would have hated as a curtained table swallowed his coffin. It seemed
far to small to contain him, yet it did. There were lots of people,
though I had the feeling that many were there as I was; to make sure
he was really dead. Closure or something? Stood in my new black
clothes I felt my eyes began to prickle with tears. People nodded and
patted my hand. We filed out of the chapel and I knew the next
funeral would start again in only a few moments.
Even the flowers, laid so lovingly on
the car park with a plaque for his name would be chucked in the skip
round the back in a few hours. I knew this because I had parked a
ways out, still deciding if I should go or not. I watched the crows
in the trees and thought of omens and blessings. People milled around
and some quietly shook my hand mumbling before wandering off. As I
wasn't (thankfully) the focus for most of the folks, my step-mother
(or more accurately the wife of my father) was I was able to slink
away and sit in my car starring at the pine trees and in my rear view
mirror the next funeral. Now came the wake which I would have gladly
skipped entirely.
Most of the people there would be
people I did not know (I had not even been sure I was at the right
funeral until I saw my step-mother and her bloated son). Most people
only new who I was when other distant family members pointed me out
to them in clipped whispers. Yes the black sheep had returned,
temporarily. Still, I told myself, it is only one day.
Back at the house, his house, people
were milling around with plates and glasses. The house was neither
modern or antique and smelled of lilies my Not-mother had placed
everywhere and gin.
My father's drink of choice. After the
staring and the whispers became too much I found myself in my
father's study. No lilies here. His great Georgian writing desk
dominated the small room and the french-windows let in the grey light
of a mid-Autumn day. It was tidier than had ever seen it. The
strange paintings that flanked the walls in lurid colours were not
brightening but jarring against the beigeness of the room. I found a
bottle and a glass in a small sideboard opposite the french-windows
and held the glass to my lips. The smell it made my eyes prickle with
tears again. A half smoked cigar still sat in a heavy cut glass
ashtray. Suddenly I was angry. If he hadn't been dead, I could have
killed him. Except that wasn't true. I was just so different?
Difficult?I just wasn't like them. I had no aptitude for cut-throat
business or money. No desire to bully, lie or viciously get my own
way. I was born with a moral compass that my family despaired at.
“Just cheat Amelia.”
“Just lie.”
“Stop making such a fuss, everyone
does it.”
“You are so quaint, so naive.”
“This is how the world works.”
Bile rose in my throat. No not the
black sheep, the white in a family of black sheep. Yet I seemed to
have my father's temper, and his nose and feet. All of this swirled
in the glass and the room and I thought about screaming.
Suddenly the door behind me opened. A
man came in. He was older, maybe the same age as my father wearing (unsurprisingly) a black suit. I didn't recognise him from the
funeral but I had not really been paying attention.
“You must be Amelia, I am Alistair.”
He bowed dramatical and took off his
hat showing his close cropped almost shaved head and shut the door
behind him.
There was something about him. A power.
An energy. His eyes were sort of grey and impossible to read. His
smile was both warm and disturbing as though his face was
unaccustomed to performing the task. He stood straight again and he
looked at me his head tilted, eyes tightening.
“So you are the witch. Huh.”
He said with a deep grunt of amusement
and something like pride.
“I am impressed.”
I hadn't said anything. Not for lack of
words but more the startling sensation that I knew this man yet found
no memory would come to mind.
“Alistair?”
I also gave him the deep penetrating
stare I am often known for and he smiled.
Yes, Alistair Angelblood. Now we don't
have a lot of time.”
He moved past me to behind the desk and
reached into a painting. Now by this I do not mean reached through a
painting, or behind it but into a painting (a hideous purple vase
with orange flowers.)
He reached in deeper and deeper and I
must confess I was slack jawed and and speechless.
“Ah, here we are. An excellent safe
don't you think?”
He tossed the contents of the safe to
me. This was slightly painful as the large labradorite pendant set in
silver with a equally heavy thick chain does not land easily.
“Put it on. It is your inheritance,
your birthright”
I put it on. As I did it zapped me
leave a small pink mark on the inside of my wrist. Then he handed me
a wand. It was wooden and silky smooth. It felt light and yet
slightly warm. I moved it slowly and Alistair twitched slightly like
I held a cocked gun.
He smiled and took my left hand in his.
“I am not your father. I know today
has been terrible and that you are confused. Right now though there
are two, possibly three assassins here to kill us, so we had better
get moving, don't you think?”
I confess I thought that one or both of
us had lost our minds. The sincerity of his eyes and the sweat on his
brow were believable enough to say
“okay.”
He smiled like he won a prize and he
put his hand into a different picture. A desert scene. Everything
that happened next happen very quickly. We jumped. As we jumped he
pulled out his wand from inside his suit pocket and fired off a pulse
of vivid green light two two men bursting through the door also in
black suits. He hit one and he fell hitting the picture frame and
turned to black dust. The other still coming shot a spark of pulsing
orange light that Alistair caught on his wand and returned to our
pursuers. It hit him squarely in the chest. His crooked body fell
into the painting with a wet and sickening thud right next to me.
“Huh!”
Was all he said, like he had hit a
rabbit in the road.
“What? Who? Where?”
“Not the time my dear.”
With that he towed me through the
painting. Where we are is still a little complicated. It was the
painting but the sand dunes were carved from rock and covered in
dust. Just behind the dunes was the top of a tower, and more
importantly for me at that moment, a door. Though confused and rather
annoyed I have a strong survival instinct and those guys were not
shooting blanks. We ran.
The door was wood so old it was like
iron. I reached out my hand and with my touch it swung easily open. I
ran into the tower as did Alistair but there was a third pursuer and
as he approached the door running at full pelt the door slammed it's
self shut.
“What the hell is going on?”
I glared at him, it was a powerful
glare, one usually reserved for drunken cat callers or someone trying
to sit next to me on a train.
“I am not your father.”
“I know that. Stop saying that.”
I was yelling by now. I was having a
tough day after all.
“Why don't we sit down and you can
ask me anything you want?”
The room was large, large than the
tower on the outside but not significantly so. The walls were plain
white and the floor stone. Alistair dropped two coins onto the floor
and the coins grew into chairs. I think that is the only way to
describe it. They were about 5ft apart from each other and I sat
down. Alistair sat down. He crossed his legs and took off his hat.
For a while we just looked at each other. I was trying to breathe and
calm myself while observing all I could. His suit was expensive, well
cut and black but there were flashes of blue silk linings and his tie
has an elaborate pin. His shoes too were though not brand new
expensive and leather. He looked healthy, strong and smug. I searched
the features of his face. Though my eyes are hazel and his grey our
colouring was similar. His eye shape was more pronounced but not
glaring different. We were not unalike.
“Where are we?”
“In a painting.”
“How are we in a painting?”
I was starting to get twitchy by this
point and I began tapping my wand against my knee.
“You won't like the answer.”
I raised my eyebrows in indication I
wanted him to answer.
“Magic. We are in a painting, that is
constructed by magic. In a tower that is made of magic. That can move
paintings.”
“I know about magic. Okay I am a
witch. I am pagan. I dance the circle and all of that. Goddess and
speaking to dead people, this, this is something else!”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why is it something else?”
“Because, this isn't real, it
doesn't, you can't do things like this.”
He smiled again.
“You just did.”
He flicked imaginary lint from him
trousers. My brain was just not accepting any of this.
“How did we do it?”
“Did you never wonder why the things
you made were so different than that of others? Did you never wonder
why you could do things so easily?”
“Other people can do what I do.”
“Other people...you have taught?”
“Well yes but...”
He smiled again. It was really starting
to piss me off. There was a loud boom. The tower shook.
Instinctively, I cast a circle around me. It hovered in the air a
bubble of woven golden threads of light.
“Amelia, I don't think that was a
good idea.”
“Shut up.”
There was another boom and the tower
shook again. A fine dust fell crackling in the light.
“Amelia, on the wall over there is a
lever and all we have to do is move it and the tower will move and
they won't be able to get in.”
“Who is they? Why are they trying to
kill me? Are they trying to kill me?”
“We don't have time.”
Boom.
I glare at him.
“Alright, I am a bad man, a terrible
man, a dark sorcerer of immense power and wealth. Please drop the
circle.”
“No.”
Boom.
“ I don't know if they were trying to
kill you, definitely trying to kill me, but they will now. Please,
please let me keep you safe.”
“No.”
I turned and pointed my wand at the
lever. It glowed for a moment and moved. Then everything became
blurry. It is like being really drunk and dancing. All the walls and
floor moved.
The circle held. Yet the room was
entirely different now. It was even bigger. It was taller by far and
there were plants, flowers and trees everywhere. There were birds
flying high above. Everywhere was infused with light. It beautiful.
I released the circle, drawing back the
power through the wand into me. It felt weird. It was Alistair's turn
to glare.
“What did you do? You couldn't have
just trusted me?”
“Hello? Dark sorcerer! Who knows what
ever plans you have.”
He stood slowly. He placed his hat onto
the chair and came close to me. I clenched my wand like it was a
weapon.
“Everything you say is true. I have
many plans. Yet I would never ever hurt you.”
He was very close now looking down at
me and I don't know why but I rested my head against his chest and I
cried. He stroked my hair lightly and there we stood for a little
while.
Gulping air like I had been drowning I
pulled away and fished a tissue from my sleeve (funeral clothes
rarely come with needed pockets).
I moved over to a rug of growing grass
and sat down on it. Then I lay down. I lay there and looked at all
the beauty. Alistair opens the door to try and figure out which
painting we are in. There is only darkness outside.
“Should I just un-zap it?”
“No, no. It is fine.”
“We might be in a mirror...never
mind.”
I then have the panic return. I have to
get home. I have a P.T.A. meeting.
